Can Democrats Really Fix Affordability?

SPEAKER_1 (0:06)

From the heart of our nation's capital, Washington, DC., backed by the trusted voices of Team Fox, a clear fresh voice cutting through the noise to tell the truth. It's The Guy Benson Show with Guy Benson.

Guy Benson (0:31)

It is Friday, November 13th, 2026, Friday the 13th, here on The Guy Benson Show. Welcome, everyone, to the program. We're here together for the next three hours, 3 to 6 p.m. Eastern, every weekday, noon to 3 Pacific time. We're out here on the West Coast all week long as guests of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and we are very grateful for that. We've got a great lineup for you. We'll tell you about it in just a second. I'm a political analyst at Fox News, and a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner. You can follow me on TV and in my writing work at those two places respectively. And then of course, we've got this show every day. If you miss a moment of the broadcast, there's a podcast for that, guybensonshow.com, foxnewspodcast.com, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And of course, there's bonus Benson on the weekends as well. GBS at fox.com, send us an email about anything that might be on your mind. You can also follow us. We encourage this, social media, at Guy Benson Show. If you're interested in my thoughts and my content, personally, it's at Guy P. Benson. Coming up later this hour, Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow here at Hoover, really sharp political analyst and historian. He will be here talking about some of his lessons derived from the midterm elections of last week. See what he has to say about that, where the Trump administration and the president might go from here for the next couple of years. Looking forward to picking Victor's big brain in about half an hour from right now. Jonathan Fahey was the acting director of ICE. There are some big immigration stories on the docket right now. We will bring him in to discuss and analyze that. And because it is Friday, how about some Fridays with cat action? Cat Tymph will join us from New York in our final hour just after 5 p.m. Eastern time. That is all ahead. So, on the show last night during our home stretch, producer Christine and I reflected on our trip into San Francisco from Palo Alto for this memorable, cool dinner. And if you missed the home stretch, you can listen to that. It's on Bonus Benson coming up on the weekend as well. But part of the journey to that really cool evening was taking the train from just off of Stanford's campus into downtown San Francisco before we then ubered over to this location. And I remember sitting on this train and thinking, well, this is actually a nice train. It's clean. It's fairly new. What a contrast to a glaring, huge failure of left-wing governance in this state. And we've talked about it before. I want to talk about it again in a few contexts here, especially since we're out in California. And there have been a few pieces about like, oh, well, you know, Governor Becerra, Governor-elect Becerra, he's coming in. He's got this huge headache with the high-speed rail project. What are they going to do? This is, to me, one of the best illustrations of the party of government, the government supremacists failing so miserably to deliver on the promises they make. And I know this was not a message that was received by a lot of voters heading into last week. And Democrats didn't even really offer much of a plan of any sort about affordability aside from saying, we're not the Republicans, we're not Trump, affordability. And in a midterm setting, sometimes that is enough, and it was certainly more than enough for the Democrats last week. But I just want to remind you and just drill the message home over and over again. Their talking points do not match their governing results.

So here in this state, California, one-party rule, absolute dominance has been that way for many years. I will remind you the back story in case you are unfamiliar with this whole fiasco. Many of you probably know the details as well. But in 2008, it's a long time ago, right? Almost two decades ago, on the same day that Barack Obama won this state, unsurprisingly, voters went out and said, Oh, high-speed rail. That sounds good. There was a ballot measure to approve it. And the way it was sold, right? The way it was marketed was, we're going to get this high-speed rail system connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it'll be lickety split up and down the coast. And you can get in this really exciting new way from place to place. And it'll be environmentally friendly. They had all the benefits that they had told people. And they also said it's going to cost $33 billion.